The A’s ownership shakeup: What it means, why it happened, why Lew Wolff had to go

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Oakland Athletics owner Lew Wolff applauds his team after Yoenis Cespedes hit a three-run home run during the second inning of their Major League Baseball game against the Houston Astros, Wednesday, July 23, 2014, at O.co Coliseum in Oakland, Calif. (D. Ross Cameron/Bay Area News Group)

John Fisher probably should’ve realized this two, three, maybe four years ago–it would’ve saved all that time, all that energy, and maybe the A’s would be well on their way to a new stadium in Oakland by now.

Except… co-owner Lew Wolff and team president Michael Crowley remained atop the A’s management structure (under Fisher), and nothing happened in Oakland or anywhere. For years.

Fisher–the A’s primary owner–should’ve shoved out Wolff and Crowley a long time ago, once the plans to move to San Jose were crushed, or those two should’ve realized that their leadership was only making a really bad situation much, much worse.

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But at least something happened a few days ago: Wolff announced that he was stepping down as the A’s managing partner and would sell his percentage of the team, and Crowley was replaced by Earthquakes president David Kaval, who immediately and repeatedly said that all focus is on building a new stadium in Oakland, whether it’s on the Coliseum site or elsewhere in town.

This is long overdue, obviously. Long, long, long, long overdue for anybody who has been paying even half-attention to Wolff’s public attempts to build a stadium for the A’s in Fremont (no-go) and mostly in San Jose (no, no, no, not happening) and then who knows what he was trying to do and what universe Wolff thought he was in.

Here’s the real universe that Fisher is finally, finally facing by taking over the full ownership of this team and moving Kaval in as his front man:

-The A’s have run a skeleton operation for years (yes, dating back to the years before Wolff and Fisher), below major-league levels in almost every department except baseball operations;

They’re not just the A’s really, they’re “the cheap A’s” throughout this marketplace–which is not a good sales point if you’re actually competing for Bay Area consumers’ attention and dollars;

I presume this immediately will be changed by Kaval–the A’s will operate like a real major sports business for the first time in a while, and that’s a step;

-Under Wolff and Fisher, when they’ve competitive on the field it has only been due to Billy Beane’s manic maneuvers under severe financial limitations, and sometimes those have back-fired, as manic maneuvers can and will;

So the recent product has not been very competitive and interest in the A’s has bottomed out;

The combination of a bland team plus players who are always traded away after a few years plus bad marketing plus a sour stadium situation… is not viable and is proving that way, yet it was the Wolff Formula.

-They’ve depressed their own marketplace intentionally by complaining about their stadium for so long and for so little actual effect;

Yes the Coliseum is dreary but it’s also the A’s home, you know, where they want fans to pay money to watch their games;

-They’ve been very profitable throughout this intentionally bleak process by keeping the payroll low while also cashing large annual revenue-sharing checks, in excess of $30M recently, and doing nothing tangible about a new stadium.

Wait, the lack of a new stadium is the only reason they’ve been getting revenue-sharing checks, and other owners were beginning to notice the implied hypocrisy;

Yes, there are now strong rumblings that the A’s revenue-sharing cash cow is about to end or be severely limited by MLB, by the way;

Which is what I assume brought Fisher and Wolff back to reality… and pushed Wolff out, finally.

Broadly, no franchise can or should be defined by their long-term disdain for their stadium, and yet that’s exactly where Wolff put the A’s for the last several years.

That doesn’t sell. It never sold. It’s a black hole for marketing and fandom and hope. If you are operating in a real-world market, without cash subsidies… if you are actually trying to succeed… you cannot keep doing it this way.
Wolff bet a lot of the A’s future on the hope to move the team to San Jose, and that was never going to happen if the Giants were against it, and the Giants made it all too clear immediately and forever that they were 1,000% against it.

Once that fell apart, the A’s had nothing except cashing those revenue-sharing checks and going through the motions of looking for a new stadium–largely to keep those revenue-sharing checks coming.

So what was the Wolff Era really about? Nothing. It was about moving nowhere and complaining about it constantly.

And you can’t do that in a competitive marketplace, you just can’t.

I spelled out Lew Wolff’s extreme credibility gap a few times during his tenure.

Wolff is the man speaking for the A’s, trying to get the A’s to San Jose, and now complaining that the fans aren’t showing up in Oakland while he gives every indication that he can’t stand being in Oakland.

That is not how you present a case.

He’s not the money guy or the most important guy, and none of this was ever going to be easy, for anybody. But maybe Wolff is the guy who has made it that much more difficult by gumming it up, at least in the last four or five years of ultimate frustration.

Fisher has pushed Wolff forward as front man and executor–that’s Fisher’s problem. And he’s made it everybody’s problem or at least everybody who cares about the A’s.

And that’s a lot of people.

What now? Kaval is the front man, and you can probably already conclude from his burst of media appearances this week that he’s an entirely different voice for this team and that at the very least he will spend his time trying to rebuild the connection to the A’s East Bay base, instead of destroying it.

Nothing is going to come easy for the A’s in this stadium search, but Kaval’s placement clarifies things–Fisher recently has taken an interest in the Howard Terminal site that Wolff long-ago ruled out, and I have reported that there are several other big-time Bay Area people very, very interested in investing in the A’s (or buying them) if they can square up a downtown location.

Under Kaval, the Earthquakes have been positioned and marketed. The A’s just sat there collecting revenue-sharing checks and complaining.

If the A’s lose some or all of their revenue-sharing subsidy, they will have to operate like a real business, which, as I’ve noted, will be a sea change for this franchise from recent years.

They will have to do everything possible to find a new stadium in Oakland, or else…
Fisher might throw up his hands up once and for all and sell the team to a group interested and capable of building in Oakland.
Gee, I think I might know a few people who would be interested:

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